Manufacturing Enurement to the End of the World
Image by Mandy Ferrer.
The country has seemingly chosen not to be prepared as much as grow inured.
-David Wallace-Wells, “Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene,” New York Times, October 2, 2024
Live-streamed genocide inflicted by Israel and its sugar daddy the United States in Gaza, replete with regular images of dead Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble produced by American-made bombs, and now a vicious Israel-US assault on Lebanon possibly spiraling into a mass murderous regional war across the Middle East?
A seemingly endless meat-grinder of a US-provoked inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, with regular images of mass destruction and death and the ever-present heightened risk of nuclear war?
More people killed and towns leveled by recurrent outbreaks of unprecedented extreme weather clearly resulting from the heedless US-led carbon capitalist project of turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber — this as predicted by climate scientists who have been warning us for years about the dire consequences of the reckless mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels?
Masses of people turned into desperate migrants trying to flee social, environmental, economic, and political disasters produced by the US-led imperialist order?
Yet another mass shooting in the Armed Madhouse that is the contemporary US, home to 115 guns for every 100 people?
The takeover of one of the nation’s two dominant political parties by a truth-crushing Christian white nationalist neofascist movement that is ready, willing, and able to overthrow previously and long normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as it is?
“Oh well, whatever, that’s how it is, that’s life. Let’s not get all crazy and radical about things. It is what it is. Nothing I can change. None of my business. What’s for dinner?”
One of the different “manufacturing consent” roles of the capitalist state media is to inure masses of people to the lethal insanity of the capitalist-imperialist system. Let’s call it manufacturing enurement.[1]
Inure (enure in British English) is a clever and underestimated word. Merriam Webster online defines it as follows: “to accustom people to accept something undesirable as in ‘children inured to violence.’”
Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function brings up these words as related and similar to “inure”: harden, toughen, accustom, season, habituate, acclimatize, desensitize, naturalize.
I might add “deaden” and “normalize.”
We are seeing this key mass media function — manufacturing enurement — in operation quite a bit these days.
Take Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump and the US presidential election. Here we are again for the third US quadrennial electoral extravaganza in a row with one of the nation’s two major and viable parties running a malignant narcissist and fascist lunatic – Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump – for the most powerful and dangerous office on Earth (an office this demented maniac actually held between 2017 and 2021). Almost every day brings a new insane comment, lie, and promise from this unspeakable ogre, this adjudicated sex offender who openly channels Adolf Hitler.
The other party is running a blood-soaked imperialist and longtime mass incarcerator who backs genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and promises to keep the United States military “the most lethal [killing] force on the planet.” Killer Kamala joins the Fatherland Party (the Republifascists) in backing ecocidal fracking and draconian nativist barriers for Latin Americans trying to escape the Hell that US imperialism has made of life for millions in their home countries.
Both parties and their candidates are committed to a growth-addicted fossil capitalist-imperialist system that is cancelling prospects for a decent future and raising the specter of human extinction via the deepening climate catastrophe and/or nuclear war.
Never mind the images of dead children buried in hospital rubble caused by US-made 2000-pound bombs.
Never mind the images of whole towns destroyed by wildfires and floods, burnt and drowned corpses on display as capitalism turns the planet into a lethal oven.
Never mind the weather maps showing three new hurricanes forming in the dangerously warmed Gulf of Mexico, including now Milton, a Category 5 storm headed for the fascist-run state of Florida.
This is all treated across the dominant US mass media as things to which we are to be properly accustomed, acclimated, desensitized, familiarized, seasoned, and deadened – inured.
An ecocidal capitalist-imperialist fascist party running malevolent Nazis is presented as the latest version of the nation’s “conservative” politics. An ecocidal capitalist-imperialist bourgeois-democratic party running a faux-progressive genocide apologist and warmonger ready to tip the world ever closer to nuclear war with Russia is reported as the “liberal,” even “left” alternative.
Inuring us to the extreme destructiveness and oppression of the system is a big part of what “our” – the ruling class’s – media is all about. It’s mission includes accustoming us to the sociopathic class rule and anarchy of capitalism-imperialism. It’s about getting masses to shrug their shoulders and say “well, that’s how things how go” or “that’s the way it is” (the iconic CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite’s nightly news sign off during my 1960s childhood) and/or “what else is new?” and/or “oh well” as despicable horrors unfold before our eyes if we bother to look anymore.
Any radical criticism of this insanity is labelled as, well, “extremism” and therefore as beyond the parameters of acceptable debate.
Let’s not get extreme! As if what the capitalist-imperialist system and its top power the United State are doing to the world and even to its own people isn’t extreme. You want extreme? Look at the shocking pace and scale of the genocide that Israel has carried with the full backing of its imperial sponsor Uncle Sam in Gaza. Look at the tremendous fossil-capitalist heating of the oceans and the air that is producing gargantuan devastation via floods, landslides, storm surge, drought, heat waves, tornados, derechos, cyclones, wildfires, and tornados the world over. Look at the ongoing and accelerating destruction of essential biodiversity that results from the relentless expansion required by capital’s holy rate of profit. Look at the desperate mass migrations caused by capitalist climate destruction and other forms of imperial ruination in Africa and Latin America. Look at the insanely reckless US provocation of nuclear Russia and nuclear China on their immediate borders. Look at the 30-year life expectancy gap between Chicago’s affluent white Streeterville neighborhood (90 years) and the city’s impoverished Black community of Englewood (60 years). Look at the wild maldistribution of means in the US, where the top tenth of the upper One Percent possesses as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. Look at the size and scale of the racist US mass incarceration system and the widespread ownership of guns including military assault rifles in the US. Look at the ubiquitous celebration of sadistic violence on US television, movie, and video screens.
Look at the daunting scale of the US military empire, which accounts for 40 percent of world military spending, eats up more than half of US federal discretionary spending, maintains more than 750 military bases across at least 80 countries, and keeps 230,000 military personnel abroad even as it lacks enough federal emergency staff to respond properly to “homeland” environmental disasters resulting from the global profits system that empire advances and enforces.
The liberal Russian émigré and political commentator Masha Gessen recently reflected on the mass media’s normalization of extreme lying and racism in a New York Times column on the recent televised debate between the fascist vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and the Weimar Dems’ vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. As Gessen notes, the debate’s CBS moderators agreed in advance not to fact check the serial liar Vance and asked questions that gave credence to Trump’s extremely ridiculous claim that Walz “supports abortions in the ninth month.” The debate hosts created false equivalence between (a) Vance’s preposterous leviathan lies – that “Trump saved Obamacare,” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that January 6 was a peaceful protest, that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio – and (b) Walz’s mistaken or fibbed statement on where he was during China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. As if (a) and (b) were remotely equal. “When you place lies and facts on an even footing” Gessen writes: “it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics… What I think their thinking was — and I can only conjecture — but their thinking was probably: We have one candidate who is in the habit of lying, as is his running mate. Let’s find a way that we can show that we’re equally critical of both candidates…It’s a classic false equivalence. Walz is talking about his time in Hong Kong and possibly fibbing, possibly misremembering, but it’s a minor, minor thing in his background. Versus Vance’s out-and-out lies about an actual insurrection and actual violent attack on our institutions of state. To put them on the same level is absurd” (emphasis added).
As Gesse’s critique suggests, the media is inuring US citizens to serial lying by “their” (the ruling class’s) politicians.
Liberal intellectuals like the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg and Molly Parker bemoan the mainstream media’s default “sane-washing” of Trump and his candidacy. As Goldberg put it in a newsletter last June: “It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our [the media’s] responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize.”
That all sounds very clever but it would better to go with “fash-washing” here because Amerikaner neofascism is the basic and extreme content behind all the “nutty,” “bizarro,” “insane,” and “weird” rhetoric of Trump and Vance. At the same time, the mass media’s mess enurement/normalization/”sane-washing” function is hardly limited to the madness of Adolph Trump. It applies to the savage imperialism and corporatism of the Democrats and indeed to the whole damn insane capitalist-imperialist system – dare I say mode of production? – that happens to be cancelling all prospects for a decent future (and will surely do so if it isn’t overthrown quite soon, historically speaking).
The environmental writer David Wallace-Wells recently published a Times Op-Ed offering the following dark reflections on why the US “slept” through Hurricane Helene, failing to adequately prepare for and properly process the incredible destructiveness of the capitalogenic superstorm:
“Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word ‘unsurvivable.’ And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise. You might have thought, not that long ago, that the arrival of extreme weather could wake us up, belatedly, from climate complacency. But the dull drumbeat of disaster seems almost to be putting us to sleep instead. Even the imminent arrival of a cataclysm like Helene, a Category 4 storm that spanned more than 400 miles across the Gulf Coast and threatened communities as far north as Appalachia, was not enough to generate all that much attention ahead of time, when more might have been done to limit the devastation… Soon enough, the storm claimed a foothold on the country’s front pages and in the national consciousness. But by then it was hard to escape the impression that as natural disasters and extreme weather events pile up in our feeds they are somewhat losing their salience as a cultural force, producing less a sense of ruptured reality than more quotidian disruption, even receding from view as a perverse consequence of ubiquitousness. Back-to-back hurricanes, thousand-year floods, the return of the urban firestorm — many of these grim disasters seemed to loom larger as horrifying long-term predictions than they do as actual weather events that are presently leaving whole populations devastated in their wake… there was [relief] action…the tragedy of Helene is not that nobody arrived in its wake to help, because people have. The tragedy is that the storm did more and got there first. The pattern is by now familiar, but the country has seemingly chosen not to be prepared as much as grow inured.”
Well, yeah. Are we supposed to be surprised? The warnings go back decades. Turn the planet into a Greenhouse Gas Chamber with the excessive capitalist extraction and burning of fossil fuels and you create lethal extreme weather. This is what the anarchic capitalist mode of production does, comrades. Five hundred years of it is enough. Time to stop normalizing it.
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” So said the recently departed Marxian cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (1934-2024), describing a dark trend in futurist literature. It’s long past time to get over that stunted vision and turn it on its head: we must end capitalism before it ends us.
Just for the record, I settled on working with the word “inure” before I read Wallace-Wells’ excellent commentary and was pleasantly surprised to see that it is the last word in his column.
An earlier and shorter version of this essay appeared on The Paul Street Report.
Endnote
+1. American English’s word “inure” is spelled as “enure” in British English. British English’s word “enurement” means “the state of being accustomed or habituated to something.” American English’s word “inurement” is a legal term meaning “benefit.”
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:30
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